Thursday, 18 September 2014

Too Clever by Half

I was trying to make a point about the importance of organic matter, and crop rotations, but had to backtrack on some of it.

Fighting Wireworm May Save the Potato Industry

Wireworms are nothing but trouble for farmers. Voracious
worms that feast on grain , fruit,grasses, root crops, and whatever else farmers have planted. The damage
is usually enough to keep produce from being acceptable on blemish free
supermarket shelves. Wireworms
have forced some families to quit farming, costing others thousands of
dollars.Depending on the species
they emerge as click beetles every 2 to 5 years and can fly somewhere else to
do extend their damage. So Petrie have you lost your mind??

It’s how farmers are being forced to fight wireworm that I
find interesting, maybe hopeful.In Canada Thimet is the only insecticide that works, but after several
extensions it’s supposed to lose its registration in 2015, with nothing in the
pipeline to replace it.So farmers
are being forced to look at crop rotations with brown mustard and buckwheat,
which have proven to be quite an effective way to control wireworm numbers. The
crops are cut and plowed under, not harvested, and release bio-toxins that kill
and control wireworm populations. Here’s the thing. Thinking about crop rotations as a
way to improve the quality of the “money maker” crop in the second, third or fourth year ofa rotation is a welcome return to how
farmers used tothink about crop
rotations.More recently, because
farmers have been paid so poorly for table and processing potatoes, the second
and third years of a rotation have to be money makers too, so soybeans, and
corn have become popular rotation crops. They are certainly more valuable than
barley or hay, but they’re harvested late with little chance for fall cover
crops, and do little to improve organic matter levelsin the soil. And I can’t think of anything that’s more
important to reversing the negative cycle of nitrate and pesticide leaching,
anoxic rivers,sedimentation, and
now the growing need for irrigation,than improving soil quality. And that just won’t happen unless crop rotation
is taken seriously, and rotation crops are viewed as ways of improving soil
structure and health,not of
keeping farmers from going bankrupt.

I had the privilegeof interviewing many of the old hands in the potato industry, the movers
and leaders through the 60’s, 70’s and 1980’s (the videos can be seen on the
Youtube channel of the PEI Potato Board). They all worry about the brutal economics in the potato
industry, prices they’d seen in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s while the cost of
production has skyrocketed. Many worry about the shortcuts farmers have been
forced to take to survive, the growth in farm size as farmers chase economies
of scale. All worry about the future of the industry.Several spoke passionately aboutthe crop rotations that worked for them. Yes, they’d say,there would be a lot of sod to wrestle
with in the potatoes grown after a hay crop, but you had to do it to keep the
soil healthy.Some talked about
the importance of keeping cattle to have the manure to put back on the
land.All accepted that if you
could break even on a rotation crop, generate a little cash at the elevators
delivering grain,that was fine,
because it was the potatoes that had to pay the bills,and quality and yield came from
good soils.These guys know what
they’re talking about.

I’m not saying this is an issue on every farm, and these
concerns are hardly new. The latest came from the group looking at the series
of fishkills in Barclay’s Brook in West Prince:

“The Action Committee found that soil in some land

backing onto the Barclay Brook has low

organic matter levels as a result of intensive farm

management practices leading to a greater

likelihood of soil erosion and increased surface

runoff. The Action Committee understands

similar circumstances probably occur at locations

throughout the province making watercourses more

vulnerable to contaminated surface runoff.”

I really wish wireworm wasn’t the reason for
farmers to think again about the proper use of crop rotations. Unfortunately
wireworm is particularly fond of grass which should be an important part of
rebuilding soil organic levels,but mustard and buckwheat are both good sources of organic matter
too.All of this requires more
research, some regulatory backbone to enforce crop rotation rules (including
common sense and flexibility, increasing organic matter should be the
yardstick), and big buyers like Cavendish Farms not countingon rotation crops to keep farmers
solvent. They’re needed to rebuild
soil quality, not backstop cheap potatoes.

Fessing Up

I have to confess to having a bad attitude towards corn, not
the sweet stuff we get to enjoy for a couple of monthes in the summer, but the
grain corn grown for livestock feed and increasingly for dozens of industrial
uses like ethanol. It started in the 1970’s when I’d done some reporting on
atrazine, a herbicide widely used with corn at the time,one of those endocrine disrupters
that’s become the most persistent contaminant in rural well water in the United
States.Atrazine was banned in
Europe a decade ago. Corn is also
linked to the huge change in U.S. farm policy in the 1970’s that shifted the
government’s role of maintaining stable commodity prices by buying up
surpluses, and releasing holdings during shortages, to subsidizing production
of certain commodities like corn and soybeans, and Earl Butz’s famous order to
U.S. farmers to “plant fence post to fence post.” All of this had a huge impact on Maritime livestock producers
who couldn’t produce feedgrains as cheaply as the U.S. mid-west, and Western
Canada.More recently my attitude
towards corn got worse when it became the base commodity to produce
ethanol.Corn is a starch that has
to be “cooked” first to produce the sugars that can be distilled into alcohol,
so it’s greenhouse gas advantage is negligible. Sugar beets, sugar cane, etc
are better candidates to do this.I
then let my corn bias show in the last column when I presented it as a poor
rotation crop for farmers. I’m here to acknowledge it doesn’t have to be.

When I moved to PEI in the late 1970’s I was able to let
corn go. There was very little grown here because the season and heat units
needed to produce reliable harvests just weren’t available on the Island. The
climate hasn’t changed much but there are now shorter season varieties giving
PEI farmers a chance to produce grain corn, and a drive around the country is
ample evidence that many farmers are doing just that. It’s still a little risky
in the Fall, not so much that the corn won’t mature, but whether farmers can
harvest at the right moisture level to allow it to store properly.Drying costs are high, and soybeans
often take priority for drying at the grain elevators.

The corn or maise plant itself is interesting and unusual.
Scientists call it a “C4”, a small group of plants that are more efficient at
photosynthesis, grab more CO2 out of the air, can better withstand dry
conditions and heat, and under normal conditions produce more plant material
than grasses and other small grains.And something else that’s worth noting, most of the corn grown now is
GMO “round-up ready” which means glyphosphateis used as a herbicide rather than the more potentially
dangerous atrazine.

Most importantly (and what I failed to acknowledge) is that
corn can add a lot of organic matter to the soil.Many farmers harvest just the cob leaving the rest of the
plant (what’s called the stover) available to be disked back in, or left as a
cover through the winter. A local grain corn grower in eastern PEI where there
are sandier soils has seen organic levels improved after years of growing
potatoes. Some farmers harvest the
whole plant as silage, but they’re almost always livestock producers with
manure to put back on the land.

And there’s one other important role that corn and soybeans are
playing on PEI.They’ve given
farmers other cash crop choices than potatoes and that could be increasingly
important in the future. The demand for potatoes, both in processing and table
markets is falling and farmers need to make smart decisions. Ignoring market
trends, planting the same as always and hoping a market will be found is not a
proven path to financial success, quite the opposite in fact. An over supplied
potato market is nothing but financial misery. Of course corn and soybeans are commodities too, and PEI
farmers remain price takers. The price outlook for corn is not good right now
with bumper crops coming off U.S. farms.

There’s one other wrinkle when it comes to corn here. There
was a PEI court case that had to decide whether corn is a row crop as defined under
the Crop Rotation Act. The judge ruled it isn’t but should be seen as a “grain”
crop. That means it could be more
widely used in a potato rotation even with increased enforcement. I’ll now keep
a more open mind to that possibility.

About Me

I've done little planning, but been extraordinarily lucky. New opportunities seem to appear when I got bored, or my boss got tired of me. After teaching at high school and university, and market gardening when I went "back to the land", I spent 30 years working for the CBC, most of it when CBC had the resources to do things that mattered, not the media sweatshop its become now. Again, I was the lucky one.